Oh. Yes of course.

These people run a country.

Saudi Arabian officials have "detained" a vulture on accusations of being a spy for Israel, media reports say.

The griffon vulture was carrying a GPS transmitter bearing the name of Tel Aviv University, prompting rumours it was part of a Zionist plot.

Wha. . . how . . . but. . . you're kidding? You are kidding, right?

Last month, Egyptian officials implied the Israeli spy agency Mossad was to blame for shark attacks off its coast.

Because they're madder than Mad Ahmed Al-Mad, winner of Arabia's maddest man competition.

When locals discovered the GPS transmitter, they suspected the worst and handed it over to the security forces, said Israel's Ma'ariv newspaper.

Conspiracy theories quickly began circulating in Saudi newspapers and on websites that the bird was involved in espionage. 

Locals? Why am I getting visions of banjos and albinos here? Is this place twinned with Hartlepool?

Israeli officials told Ma'ariv they were "stunned" by the allegations and concerned that the bird could meet a horrible punishment in the notoriously severe Saudi justice system.

Which just goes to show, there's no nutter as nutty as a religious nutter with a persecution complex.

Give me strength.

That being said, the report is from an Israeli newspaper. In case you hadn't noticed, Israel doesn't do too badly in the swivel eyed barking at the moon stakes itself.

The One That Is Reaching For His Tin Helmet. . .

So the Israelis are showing video footage of their soldiers being attacked with knives and, perhaps most shockingly, some plastic garden chairs. To be honest, I think the people on that ship can thank themselves lucky they weren't torpedoed.

Of course the whole thing could have been avoided if the IDF hadn't boarded the ships in international waters with a heavily armed assault team in an act which looks suspiciously like piracy to me.

Yes of course the Israelis have the right to security and not having rockets lobbed over their borders every ten minutes.

No the Israelis do not have the right to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Yes the Palestinians have the right to basic standards of living, food, water, power, etc, etc.

No the Palestinians don't have the right to lob missiles into residential areas whenever the mood takes them.

A plague on both their houses. Perhaps if both sides decided to stop electing arseclowns who seem to do nothing but whip the swivel eyed and terminally hard of thinking into a frenzy at every available opportunity, and stop winding the other side up, we might see some headway.

I really couldn't give a pair of dingo's kidneys who started it, who perpetrated what atrocity, or what the nasty man said or did.

Just piss off and leave the rest of us alone, will you? Stop funding Israel and stop funding Palestine. Unfortunately I get the feeling that if the international community cut both sides out completely, we'd go back in twenty years to find the whole area reduced to a pile of rubble whilst a group of raggedy clothed idiots with matted hair and beards down to their knees beat the shit out of each other with sticks because they'd run out of everything else.

Sympathy for either side at Chateau Snowolf? Somewhere between sod all and naff all.

The One That Is Saying Bollocks To The Lot Of Them. . .

Sean Lock, the comedian, came up with a good idea some time ago. His plan was to run the next series of Big Brother along identical lines to how it is run now, with one fundamental difference. Not one second of it would be broadcast, they'd be no media coverage at all. So, when the wannabes finally left the house, expecting hundreds of cheering proles and the paps with their flashbulbs popping, all they would be greeted with would be a bloke in a flat cap and overalls sweeping up the carpark. 'They've all gone home, love.' He'd tell them.

Isn't it about time we took this attitude with Israel/Palestine? I'm sick to the fucking back teeth with this collection of arsewipes. Rockets fly into Israel so Israel conducts airstrikes against Palestine.

I used to have sympathy for the 'ordinary' people on both sides of the divide, their daily lives disrupted and if particularly unlucky, lost by rocket attacks and air strikes. But now? I don't want to sound hard-hearted, but I really couldn't give a flying fuck.

Palestinians: Stop voting for Hamas. All they are going to do is agitate against Israel. By allowing yourselves to be whipped up into a frenzy and firing off rockets and blowing yourselves up on a Tel Aviv bus, the only thing you are making sure of is that Israel continues to drop bombs on you. Hamas gets an even tighter grip on power. What do they want it for? How much UN and EU aid gets pumped into Palestine? I'd like to see the accounts going in from New York and Brussels and the Palestine accounts at the end of the year. I wonder. . .

Israelis: Stop voting for arseholes who think the only course of action is to bomb Palestine. Rocket comes over the wall? Scramble the planes! Bus blows up? Scramble the planes! Drop a bottle of milk? Scramble the planes! Stop treating the Palestinians like shit. There's something very sinister about a power that rounds up a different religious and ethnic group puts them in a ghetto and then restricts their supplies, don't you think? C'mon you've been on the receiving end in the past, try some empathy. Perhaps if you treated them a bit better they wouldn't be so keen on making things go bang in an entertaining fashion.

It's always the extremists who get the attention. Fine, go ahead, vote for them. Don't expect me to mourn your lost husbands, wives, children, siblings, parents and friends. YOU chose this course of action. Get the fuck off my TV screen. If you're going to behave like squabbling children, I will treat you as such and ignore you completely.

I'd build a fucking great big wall around Israel and Palestine. Blockade the ports, shoot down any plane attempting to enter or leave their airspace. No supplies, no water, no food, no fuel, no arms, no communications.

Then in ten years you can go back in and arrest anyone left alive for war crimes.